Mohannad El-Barachi, front centre (in the black jacket) and members of the SweetIQ team, located in Montreal.
“By using the SweetIQ platform to create and manage these listings for you, and optimizing them so you are displaying for many more of the search terms consumers are searching for, your business will appear significantly more times in these discovery searches, driving more local engagement and in-store traffic, which we can actually measure.”
El-Barachi has a strong Concordia connection — his sister, May El-Barachi, MASc 04, PhD 10, and mother, Somia El-Barachi, MASc 93, earned graduate degrees at the university.
“At Concordia, I did a degree in computer science with a minor in political science,” he says. “That taught me how to code and how to argue — both of these have been helpful in allowing me to run my business.”
And that business is clearly booming. A bit more than five years after its start, El-Barachi and Mire’s Montreal-based startup, SweetIQ, is now an industry leader in local search marketing. It counts Domino’s Pizza, Bell Canada and General Motors among its clients.
Statistics Canada reports Canadians spent $18.9 billion online in 2012 and the Forrester research firm predicts that figure will grow to $39.9 billion by 2019. Nonetheless, that is just a fraction of Canada’s estimated $450 billion per year retail market — brick-and-mortar outlets still account for the vast majority of retail sales.
“Ninety-three per cent of purchases are still happening in stores. People still like to engage in a physical transaction at the store. For example, Amazon, the e-commerce powerhouse, is now opening hundreds of physical stores,” says El-Barachi.
“There are some services we just need to touch and feel, or require for convenience. Some people don’t like to buy clothes online, they want to try them on. Others, like grocery shopping or banking, are more difficult to just do online.”
In November 2015, SweetIQ raised $4.2 million from investors in Canada and Silicon Valley, Calif., to fuel growth in the American market. “I can’t share revenue figures but I can tell you we have been tripling in revenues and size for the last three years in a row,” says El-Barachi.
“We started off in 2010 with four employees and we just hired our 52nd employee this past month. We are now looking at setting up a physical office in the United States as well, and anticipate being well over 100 employees by early 2017.”